A Lexicon for Lost

The American Heritage Dictionary defines: lost v. 7.a. To let (oneself) become unable to find the way. That’s all well and good as far as it goes, but as we in Oregon have many words for rain, and the Inuit for snow, The Logging Road Cyclist has found it necessary to divvy this up a bit more. He proposes:

lost To let (oneself) become unable to get to where one needs to go (eg. “TLRC could not find his way back to the car and died of hypothermia”).

“I cain’t say I was ever lost, but I was once bewildered for three days.”

bewildered To let (oneself) become unable to get to where one wants to go (eg. “For the third time TLRC was unable to decipher the route to the top of Sugarloaf Mountain and had to cut his ride short and go back to the car, to which he clearly remembered the way”).

Failure To Meet Objective, or FTMO is a synonym for bewildered that TLRC finds useful in communicating the status of a ride to interested parties.

TLRC is the first to admit that this may be slicing the salami pretty thin. There are certainly circumstances under which bewildered=lost to a very high degree of approximation. For example. Last summer, TLRC did Velodirt’s “Rapture”, involving 70+ miles of riding and many thousands of feet of climbing. About 20 miles from the end of the ride, TLRC found himself bewildered. Now, there is simply no way that TLRC (given his finite capacity for pain) could have backtracked all the way to the car, no matter how well he knew which way to go. Thus, minus a way forward, TLRC was essentially lost. Doubtless readers can generate other equivalent scenarios for themselves.